“Not really,” Marshall said, which eased Colin’s mind… a bit. But Marshall went on, “She has said she wants kids one of these years. She’s, like, my age, so she’s starting to hear her clock ticking. Gals don’t get second chances the way we do.” He glanced at a photo of Deborah on the mantel.
“Tell it to your mother,” Colin replied. “You’ve made a fair pile of cash babysitting her second chance.”
“Hey, she didn’t have him in mind,” Marshall said, which wasn’t the smallest understatement in captivity. If Louise had thought there was any chance she might catch, she would have been more careful. Then she and Teo would be lovey-dovey to this day.
Unless they weren’t. Maybe Teo would have run into a girl he’d been sweet on in high school and found out she wasn’t attached—or wasn’t too tightly attached. Stuff like that happened all the time. And the rage that went with it was one of the many reasons police forces wouldn’t go out of business day after tomorrow—or millennium after tomorrow, either.
XIII
It was May. In what Bryce Miller kept thinking of as normal times, the countryside around Wayne State would have been bursting with spring. The grass would have been green. New leaves would have decked the trees. The birds would have been singing their heads off. Half the sophomore girls would have been wearing as little as the law allowed. Nebraska or not, that would have made for some pretty fine eye candy.
Even after the supervolcano eruption, spring would at least have been thinking about showing up most years. Not in the wake of the Siberian Express and the two other, almost equally horrendous, blizzards that followed it. Good old Theocritus wouldn’t have got very far with pastoral poetry about the landscape he could see in these parts.
Snow still lay on the ground—not here and there, as it had in some other post-eruption springs, but all over. The drifts were taller than a tall man. Bryce, a tall man, could testify to that. Daytime highs hadn’t got out of the thirties yet. The weathermen kept hopefully saying they would real soon now. The weather kept making liars of the weathermen.
A crow hopped across the crusted snow. It cocked its head now this way, now that. Its beady black eyes were alert for anything that might be food. A mouse? A discarded parsnip fry? Crows weren’t fussy. They ate anything people did, and more besides.
Compared to what the winter had brought, of course, highs in the thirties seemed wonderful. Bryce was just chilly as he walked over to the library to meet Susan—she’d come to campus to do some research for an article she was writing. She still hoped for an academic job of her own, but the hiring situation looked bleaker than ever.
The paths on campus were free of snow. Machines had done the hard work at first. There weren’t enough machines to cope with the new winters, and fuel cost too much to keep them going. Like so much of what had been routine before the eruption, nowadays they were for emergency use only.
For non-emergency use, Wayne State had students with snow shovels. Throwing snow around wasn’t a requirement like passing your English courses and U.S. history. But the college paid for the work, either in money or in meal tickets at the student union. From what Bryce had heard, more shovelers chose meal tickets. The food at the union wasn’t great, but Bryce didn’t think you could get great food at any restaurant in Wayne.
A student coming the other way on a bicycle raised one hand from the handlebars to wave to Bryce. “Hey, Professor!” he called as he went past.
“Hey!” Bryce waved back. Little by little, he was getting used to students calling him Professor. The student population stayed pretty much the same age, while he—dammit!—kept getting older.
He’d started noticing that back in L.A., when he taught at Junipero High. The boys there had all looked like kids. Some of the girls, though, were definitely edible, to his eyes if not necessarily to the eyes of the law. Just how edible some of them seemed was something he’d never discussed in detail with Susan. No, he’d never done anything about it. No, he’d never even intended to. But he’d never discussed it with her, either.
Students here were college-age, of course. He’d put on a few years, too, though. And he kept putting them on. These days, even some of the girls in his courses looked like escapees from middle school. They weren’t, but they looked that way to him. It was almost reassuring that others still seemed pretty damn hot.
The girls, hot or not, also called him Professor. They called him sir, too, which made him feel all the more an antique. They were polite here, more polite than in SoCal. That part of the courtesy, he could have done without.
Susan waited for him outside the library. She never would have done that during the winter. They hugged and briefly kissed. “Find what you were looking for?” Bryce asked.
“Some of it.” Susan sighed. “I’ve filled out an interlibrary-loan slip for the rest. Will you come in and sign it for me?”
“I’d better.” Being on the faculty, Bryce had the power to call spirits from the vasty deep and obscure journals from libraries around the country. Susan, a mere spouse, didn’t. That never failed to irk her.
They bicycled back to town after he put his John Hancock on the paperwork. In due course, the journals would arrive, scholarship would advance, and all would be well with the world—except the article still wouldn’t win Susan a job.
Something was different when they got to Wayne. Several buses were letting people out at a stop not too far from their apartment. The buses were not the usual, ordinary but elderly, wheezers and groaners that hauled people around this part of northeastern Nebraska. These were elderly, but a long way from ordinary. One was olive drab. Two more were painted in faded desert camo. And a couple of others, while they sported ordinary paint jobs, had bars on the windows that suggested their intended passengers might not be thrilled about staying aboard.
“Hello!” Bryce said. “What have we got here?”
People were getting off the buses and milling around near them. By the expressions on their faces, a lot of them were getting their very first looks at Wayne, and were thinking pretty much what he’d just said. Either that or What the fuck?, which came close enough for government work.
And government work it was. The milling people sometimes hid and sometimes showed the paper banners taped to the sides of their buses. NEW HOMESTEAD ACT SETTLERS, Bryce eventually read. “Wow!” he exclaimed. If he sounded amazed, well, he was. “It really is gonna happen! How long since they passed that bill?”
“A year and a half? Two and a half years? Something like that,” Susan answered. Bryce remembered seeing on the news that the bill had finally passed, but he couldn’t recall how long ago it had been, either. Since it passed, there’d been more frantic wrangling in Congress about whether to appropriate any real, live money for it.
They must have finally coughed up the cash, because here were these buses of new homesteaders. Some of them looked as if they might possibly know something about living on a farm or in a small Midwestern town. Others seemed stunned. Bryce could read their faces with no trouble at all. When I volunteered for this, I figured anything beat staying in that goddamn camp one more minute, they were thinking. That’s what I figured, yeah, but maybe I was wrong.
Locals were coming out of houses and shops to give the newcomers a once-over. They didn’t act much happier about what they were seeing than the homesteaders did. And Wayne was a big small town, at least by the standards of this part of the prairie. People who lived here were used to the college students who came and went. Some of the smaller places in these parts, there were no strangers who came and went. Stephen King knew what he was doing when he set horror stories in tiny towns like that.